So I got this email yesterday and it raises a question that I want to address. Basically it asks me why I'm such a fucking cunt. Or to be a little more elaborate: How can I obviously be among hipsters and yet so loathe them.

This is a question that in a very poignant way makes me face my hatred of hipsters. Oh, incidentally, I take that back, the part about hatred. I've noticed that a lot of readers who plug me on their sites bill me as a 'hipster hater' or some such phrase. But if you'll kindly refer to my first post you'll see that I do not hate hipsters, I just think they're silly and stupid. Nazis hate, the NY Post hates, I do not hate. Upon reading this I'm sure some of the pussy little hipsters out there will give a loud 'harrummph!' and point to the now volumous (and ever expanding) body of work here, which does indicate, at the very mildest, a kind of hatred directed toward hipsters. But I view my relationship with the needle-nosed bony-shouldered little fucks a different way. I view my relationship with hipsters as a child might view a cockroach waddling across her bedroom floor. She'd take a very close look at it: poking, prodding, pushing, pulling, wondering what makes it so weird looking, before finally crushing it and then looking at its brittle little corpse for a while longer. I think vindictive wonder about covers my relationship with them. Hatred notwithstanding, to everybody who reads this forum and plugs it, I thank you from the very, very bottom of my wretched, cast-iron little heart. Call me a misanthrope if you must, but please (if you can avoid it) don't call me a hater, even though I know the alliteration is tempting. Anyway, back to the question at hand: Why am I such a fucking cunt?

This question makes me face a few facts about myself. As you might guess, I have significant dealings with some pretty stinky hipsters; this is of course how I know about their likes and dislikes; their habits and manner of speech; their bedmanner (I'll get to that later) and the way they set their little espresso kettle just so on the stovetop before they leave the apartment. But when you get right down to it, down to the very nitty gritty, down to the to the toe jam and the tile grout, I do not know hipsters. I am not one of them. Being a hipster — I've determined — requires a certain obliviousness: Moral, physical, mental, social, a certain kind of dog-like unawareness; I suppose you could call it a kind of fancy-freedom, one that I lost long ago, or perhaps one that I never had. I suppose it's the same tragedy of human nature that's echoed through the endless halls of history — I mean — after all, if a cockroach could write a novel, would Kafka have ever needed to? And fuck Douglas Coupland. I know, I know, it's all very snotty of me to say, and I don't even like Kafka, it just went well with the cockroach thing, but bear with me. The point is: I have this burden that hipsters do not have. I cannot throw on a pair of horn-rimmed specs and roll up my husky Wranglers and get a tattoo of a pair of dice and wear cherry-red lipstick and still keep a straight face. I used to think this was simply because I was not bold enough, not cheeky enough: But I realized finally that it's because I have this burden of ultra-awareness that prevents me from (among other things) ever really being a hipster. I am merely an observer. Yes, and perhaps you could read some latent note of longing in this admission: You know how when people talk about their dreams, often they describe seeing themselves? As if they were floating above their body and observing the situation both from afar and through their own eyes? That's what I mean by ultra-awareness. I'm not chalking this shit up like I've got some extraordinary vision quest or anything like that, it's not that at all, it's really just that I'm acutely critical: critical of other people (duh) critical of myself, and this other me, the one that's floating above all the time, always looking around, she just won't shut up and let me act like an idiot hipster, she keeps tapping me on the shoulder and pointing out how stupid it all really is, how insignificant, how comically absurd, she keeps saying: 'Don't you read the fucking papers? We're in trouble and all you can do is talk about your goddamned haircut!' And then this cold-handed other me twists my head around to have a good long look at all the other hipsters in whatever bar or shit factory I happen to be in, and I see everybody else, and she whispers: 'God help us.'

I can't unplug this other me, so, I can't be a hipster.

I guess the next logical question you could ask is why the fuck I would, having apparently been stricken with this pang of universal consciousness, decide to spend a whole shit load of time writing negative things about stupid people rather than — say — doing something constructive. My only answer so far is I don't know.